


leave it until the morning

by ilgaksu



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Addiction, Character Study, Established Relationship, M/M, Party, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:00:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26499760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The Ketterdam Guild’s annual dinner is held around midwinter, frost icing the streets like a silent menace. There’s a certain, specific joy in knowing that despite the best hopes of at least ten of the main Guild council, they’re forced to let him attend every year anyway.
Relationships: Jesper Fahey/Wylan Van Eck
Comments: 7
Kudos: 63





	leave it until the morning

Jesper can hear the whispers a mile off. Nobody here is even half as subtle as they believe, and that’s saying something.

“Oh, Christ,” Ferdinand Braam, heir to his father’s preserve company, says under his breath, “Don’t look now, but Fahey’s arrived.” 

“You hear him before you see him,” someone else mutters to their right.

They’re a bank of tells, the lot of them, and Jesper grins, baring all his teeth, shedding his coat with a flourish and winking at the manservant taking them. The poor man flushes puce and blinks as though mesmerised for a few seconds. It’s doing wonders for Jesper’s ego. He straightens the black silk cuffs of his kaftan, thumb catching briefly on the gold thread sunk into the fabric. Through the open doors, he can already see a planetarium of pale faces turning his way. They look at him like a lion they’ve let loose amongst rabbits. 

The Ketterdam Guild’s annual dinner is held around midwinter, frost icing the streets like a silent menace. There’s a certain, specific joy in knowing that despite the best hopes of at least ten of the main Guild council, they’re forced to let him attend every year anyway. Or at least, let him attend by proxy, as the representative of the Van Eck family’s sizeable stake in the Guild, as pseudo-protector of their interests for the evening. 

Really, Jesper’s just here to raise hell. This will be the sixth time. 

_Let’s go to war_ , he thinks to himself, and steps into the ballroom. 

*

It starts six years beforehand when Jesper, a newly-minted twenty, can’t sleep, so he prowls instead. Even though this is a routine - right now the word _routine_ rolls in his mouth the same as the word _settling_. So he can’t settle. Naturally. 

There are nights like these still, stinging; wounds too fresh to have closed and bad habits too deeply formed to be unmade. To get them out under the skin would fundamentally be a kind of flaying. There will always be nights like these, Jesper is beginning - bitterly - to realise: nights where the itch under his skin rises to blazing, seeping dissatisfaction. He knows, with an intimate, certain knowledge that on the flipside of Ketterdam, cards are already slung out across tables, money slipping all over, roiling on rickety tables like a strange and hopeful sea. It sings to him like salt to a selkie, and his mouth waters. 

He also knows this house, the one with the boy upstairs in their bed, is dry land: safer to stay on, anchored. He knows too that if he came back tomorrow morning, sore-eyed and empty-pocketed and ashamed, he’d be let back in. Right now, the kindness of that feels like a cage. The guilt of that thought, however fleeting, drowns him where he stands. It would be so easy to let his head go under. Self-hatred, like the tides, has its own familiar rhythms, regularly scheduled, summoned at will. 

So he walks instead, walks because one of the first things Kaz had told is that running gives away the game - that if you run, people look to see, aware that you must be running from something - he walks, silent and restless. The house of Wylan’s childhood is panelled with wood carved as taut as a snare, mullioned-windowed like the small blinking eyes of lizards, the austere damask curtains heavy as a smothering. At night, it reveals the attempts of the day for what they are: attempts, and slow ones, at grinding down the memories of this place into something palatable. Within the first year, Wylan had consigned half the family portraits to the attic. Now, there’s only a few remnants, stragglers, martyrs, hung over the drawing room’s fireplace. 

He sits and looks at the portrait of him for a long time. It was finished this summer. Wylan had wanted it, and it had been an easy thing to give him - or so Jesper had thought, before realising he had doomed himself to three months’ worth of sittings every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, and nonstop amusement from Nina when she had found out. It had not, in the end, been an easy thing to give him. It could almost be an extended metaphor. 

The only thing Jesper thinks of when he sees the painting is to wonder if that’s how he’s truly seen. He’s never thought he looked so uncertain in public, brazen but for the eyes. But it hadn’t been for him. It had been part Wylan wanting to replace the picture of his father with something he could stand to sip tea across from, part statement of intent: _I want to remember you as you were this exact summer - even annoyed, dutiful, bored out of your mind. I want to keep this._ Jesper had read this in Wylan without Wylan ever making that feeling clear. 

He stays there until the morning - _just leave it until the morning_ , that’s what he tells himself. He remembers something his mother said, about how everything always seems worse at night, and knows it to be true. Everything is worse at night, including him, and that’s why he feels so fucking _alive._

This time, it means he’s awake early enough to see the invitation being delivered. It’s dropped off by a dark-coated servant, the man anonymous and waxy-faced through those panelled windows as a floating corpse might be underwater, caught and borne aloft by the current. Jesper sits in the grey half-light and watches him without much interest. He trails along the unlit corridors and opens the door, catching the servant unawares. 

Jesper watches the man on his - on Wylan’s - on the doorstep watch him in turn. He watches the rake of the servant’s gaze snag on each separate crease of his nightclothes and the sleepless wreck of his hair, sees it sharpen and transmute into fresh gossip right in front of his eyes. The sheer speed of it leaves him reeling. It shouldn’t. He knows this game. A new rumour’s born every hour.

Well, isn’t this starting out to be a fucking shambles of a day. The servant opens his mouth, and Jesper swipes the envelope right out of his grasp in the same breath. Sloppy, no finesse, the corner of the envelope bent back: Kaz would be ashamed of him. 

Kaz isn’t here. It’s just Jesper now. 

“Good day to _you,_ then,” Jesper snaps, and shuts the door right in the man’s face. 

* 

“Good day to you, Mister Fahey,” says Georgia de Haan, extending her hand out even as he swoops in for the kill. There’s a faint gasp from a nearby gaggle of mercher wives when his lips hit her bare skin and Jesper smothers a laugh as he straightens up. “I see you’ve joined us yet again.” 

“Of course. What other options were there? Leave you unappreciated all night?” Jesper rejoins, smiling. 

He likes Georgia de Haan. She’s a young widow, a survivor of a truly awful transaction between her father and a - now fortunately-deceased - husband fifty years her senior. She’s made an ally of Wylan, shoring up her inherited wealth against her in-laws. And the idea of Jesper Fahey dancing with a widowed beauty is going to cause a sensation. One of the Van der Klejis’ looks ready to start a riot right there and then, and Jesper is only getting started. 

“You are wasted on them,” she tells him, midway through a particularly scandalising waltz, something Jesper learnt from Wylan, although the teaching tended to trail off - the waltz is a dance that requires you to be very, very close together. 

“Is it wasted time if I’m enjoying wasting it?” Jesper makes eyes over her shoulder at the unmarried Meulenbelt daughter until her mother scowls and drags her away. “Your brother is making plans to defend you from me soon, by the way.” 

“He hates you.” 

“No,” Jesper corrects cheerfully, “He _loathes_ me.” 

*

Jesper would have to be without sense - an accusation often levelled at him but only sometimes with merit - to have not heard the gossip by now. It’s lit up the Barrel like kindling, give him your best gunpowder metaphor here, spin the bullets in the chamber and take your best damn shot: Jesper fuckin’ Fahey, switched from slavering after Kaz Brekker to in bed with the Van Eck heir. Hands in the boy’s pocketbook and the hands keep going, if you follow - like how everyone’s eyes follow them hot up the street at a respectable hour, Jesper discreetly yawning into the cup of his hand whilst Wylan splits his doe-eyed expression between Jesper and his mother peering in the windows of the of the silver shop. It's a shop that only sells silver, teasets and cups and saucers, and it doesn't even have the decency to be a pawnbroker's.

Listen, Jesper doesn’t resent Wylan’s devotion to his mother. It’s a tapestry woven up out of love in all its definitions: love-as-blood, love-as-obligation, love-as-guilt. They are both born of their mothers and carry them in turn. Jesper sees his every time he looks in the mirror, or the water of Wylan’s copper bathtub, or in the window of this stupid shop. He feels her breath in every moment of what he is, the feeling of it outstretching the meaning: Grisha, Fabrikator, _zowa._

So he gets it. He’s also _bored out of his mind._ He’s so bored that the only thing keeping him from bolting is how outraged half the street traffic are to see him at Wylan’s side, even dressed like a proper gentleman - maybe over that. The lace collar feels like being collared, like a hold unlike love. It itches like spite, makes Jesper tug on the edges of it out of Wylan’s sight. It’s high. It’s too high. Underneath it, there’s three bruises on his neck, the kind that he could have shown off to the Dregs, sex its own specific prize, but in Ketterdam proper have to be covered up like it’s not something half the city suspects of them, anyway. 

“This is some bullshit,” he murmurs. 

“Behave,” Wylan says in return. His voice sounds like the bruises ache and Jesper closes his eyes and shivers, to be sure, but he has a point to get to and nothing Wylan does can - 

Okay, no, that’s a lie. He’s extremely distractible. But that’s not the point. He has a point. 

“Wylan,” Jesper says, voice taut, “Sweetheart, _wara,_ light of my life, your mother has been agonising over that plate for twenty minutes. I know this because I have been watching her. Twenty, Wylan. She’s your mother, Wylan. You could have bought her the whole shop by now and it wouldn’t have made a dent. I could have robbed her the whole shop by now and been halfway out of here. Twenty minutes.”

“You want to go,” Wylan says. There’s something in his voice, something that sits not quite certain of accusation. It sours Jesper’s mood further. On no sleep, Wylan’s host of abandonment issues feel less like something to be soothed and more like pressure. 

“Yes, I want to go. Do I have to ask your permission?”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Jesper knows before it fully leaves his lips. Hurt turns to fury in Wylan’s face, an old defensive fear lit like a fuse in the time it takes Jesper to blink. 

“I’m not your keeper, Jesper,” Wylan hisses, and Jesper is struck by it, somehow struck down by it, and in the space it takes him to summon up something, anything - 

_I never asked you to keep me, I never asked you for anything -_

_You’re the one who -_

_I don’t know how to be like this._

Wylan’s already gone, leaving Jesper unmoored on the street. Leaving? Left? No, Jesper had wanted to go. It’s like Wylan just said. He’s not Jesper’s keeper. Jesper is his own man. It’s just - 

Sometimes, Jesper isn’t so sure he should be the one left responsible for himself. It doesn’t seem like he makes the best decisions. And everyone’s staring, and Wylan’s up on his high horse, which Jesper hates, but he also wants to run after him anyway, but he’s not someone Wylan can call to heel, and - 

Oh, fuck. 

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Jesper can’t help but ask a gawping passerby, and marches off in the first direction. It’s a dead end. 

Jesper hates extended metaphors. 

*

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” Clement de Wit snarls in his face, barely held back by the Vroom twins. Jesper shrugs. 

“Nah,” he replies. 

It’s only taken two hours this time for someone to threaten to shoot him where he stands. It isn’t as good as his personal record (fifty-seven minutes, the third year) but Jesper decided tonight was a night for taking it slow. He’s learning to savour these things. Call it Wylan’s influence. Call it a sudden attack of maturity. Call it how hilarious it is to have this trio reach raging on a slow boil. 

The last one. It’s definitely the last one. 

“You dishonoured my cousin,” de Wit spits - huh, that rhymes - and Jesper exaggeratedly frowns. 

“Pardon me,” Jesper apologises, “I truly believe there’s been some misunderstanding. Your cousin was doing an admirable job of that himself. I was only tangentially involved.” 

“You spoke rudely to his guest -”

“Rudely?” Jesper echoes, faux-outraged, “I merely assumed she was his good lady wife and referred to her by that good lady’s name. How was I to know his guest, after he was in the cloakroom with her for most of the third course at dinner, wasn’t her?”

“You have no honour,” one of the Vroom twins - Jesper never has the interest to tell them apart - says, predictably reaches for the pistol that had been concealed inside his jacket up until about, oh, half an hour ago, when the man had deliberately knocked shoulders with Jesper when Jesper had been mid-sip through his wine. 

His hand grasps at nothing, his face a perfect death mask of dismay, until - 

“It appears you’ve dropped your weapon, sir,” Jesper says, smiling genially, and hands it to him. “Funny of you to forget the rule about relieving yourself of it at the entrance. Perhaps you misremembered. Much like you misremembered your correct totals on your accounts this year to investors? Or was that your brother? Family resemblances, you know, it makes it -”

He ducks the swinging fist, pivots, and trips both Vroom twins, gleeful. He’d been dying to pull out that little trick ever since he begged Inej, on rare stay in port, to teach it to him. And now he’d managed it in front of a full audience. He may have to accept tonight has peaked here. But then one of the twins, clambering to his feet, stumbles into a table, upsetting a whole flagon of wine in a cascade over Mister Mesman, Mesman’s wife, and their son. 

The ensuing chaos is, in a word, contagious. 

*

He ends up wandering the backstreets of the Barrel, collar unfastened, thrown in his pocket. He’d stopped short of chucking it in the harbour. He can’t go see Kaz in this state - even if Kaz would have welcomed it, which he wouldn’t have, he had all the bedside manner of a carrion bird on a battlefield. Not a chance. Jesper was just going to wander, shoving the collar in his pocket so as not to lose it and - 

His hand brushes an envelope, feeling out the contours of the bent corner, and he remembers. His fingertips skip over the wax seal, already broken from when he’d opened it this morning. It’s an invitation to the Ketterdam Guild’s annual dinner. It’s the kind of thing he and Kaz used to stay up fantasising about infiltrating, all those heavy pockets out to show off their yearly yield, but they’d never figured out a way around the fact they were two of the most recognised Dregs going. He’d kept it from Wylan because anything to do with the Van Eck empire still made the light go out in Wylan’s eyes - and he was trying so hard to keep going in the huge house full of rooms where he had been beaten, trying to look after his mother and Jesper and ignore his father’s voice in his own head, that the knowing smiles of the merchers half-unravelled him at the seams on a bad day. And Jesper would have had to be the one to read it out to him, and Jesper, God help him, loves Wylan. He loves him more than he loves a splay of a good hand of cards under his fingertips, loves him more than holding a den of thieves under the sway of his sleight of hand, loves him in the way he loves his revolvers, all possession and reverence and the sense of them being an extension of himself, that to give them up would be like giving up his own bones.

And all the same, Jesper wants to be somebody, somebody outside of Kaz’s shadow, outside of the boy at Wylan’s side. He wants those who stare at him in the streets of Ketterdam to have something to stare at: something like a somebody, something impossible and untamed. Jesper is nothing if not irrepressible. _Zowa_ means _blessed_. What kind of Fabrikator doesn’t make the world bend to his own will? 

The haberdashery he goes to is partially a money-laundering front, and Jesper knows this, but he also knows the stock in the window - imported fabrics that ripple with colour like the sun setting on a cornfield - are genuine. They’ve never turned away his money before. He’s gone here ever since he washed up in the Barrel. Nobody else sold real Zemeni fabric so cheap. Everything else in this price range are just imitations of the patterns, a kick in the teeth when he was especially homesick. 

Nowadays, he has money to spare, but here’s the thing: Jesper has always been loyal, even when it would have served him better to not be. It’s part of him, sharing space with where the guilt lives. 

He buys the whole display and brings himself back to the Van Eck mansion carrying three bolts of fabric on his back. 

Wylan is asleep in the empty parlour, in a chair facing Jesper’s portrait. It clenches something in Jesper, winds it up tight. He kneels on the floor, silk rippling in a sea by his side, and runs a thumb down the curve of Wylan’s hairline. Wylan snaps awake almost instantly, panic flaring, familiar like his father taught him. 

“You’re fine, love,” Jesper murmurs, “It’s just me,” breathes through the strain of watching Wylan struggle with a place in his history that Jesper can never reach, and waits for Wylan’s gaze to shift from fear into recognition and then - 

His whole face softens. It always does. 

“You came back,” Wylan murmurs. Jesper hums in agreement and lets Wylan reach out and hook a hand around the back of Jesper’s neck, lets him bring their foreheads today. 

“I was awful,” Wylan admits. Jesper can hear the wobble in his voice. 

“We were both awful,” Jesper replies easily, “We’re learning, though. At least, I think we’re learning,” and Wylan huffs out a laugh, mouth so close Jesper can taste the air he breathes, the heat of it like a phantom kiss. 

“I want to trust you,” Wylan admits. 

“I know,” Jesper says. “I want to - I want to -” 

“Jesper,” Wylan replies. “I know. I know too.” 

They sit in silence for a while. Then Jesper takes out the envelope, and he reads it, and he explains his idea, and Wylan looks at him with serious eyes and goes, “Why would you want to go to dinner with them?” 

“I don’t know,” Jesper replies, “But I think it could be fun.” 

*

Jesper rolls in at six in the morning, still laughing. Wylan is waiting for him, looks up from his worktable and - 

His jaw doesn’t quite drop, but it’s close. Wylan hadn’t seen this year’s outfit yet. It looks like this one will be a success, much like the night itself had been. 

“What do you think?” Jesper stands, hands on his hips and Wylan looks up at him, the drag of his eyes down Jesper’s body a weight that Jesper swallows under, and carefully - too carefully - puts down his pliers. 

“I can see your collarbones,” Wylan replies. That’s not an opinion, but there’s a faint tinge to his voice and the beginnings of a familiar starving look in Wylan’s eyes, so Jesper’ll take it. 

“They’re entirely and respectably covered,” Jesper argues, for arguing’s sake. 

“I can still see the shape of them,” Wylan says. He hasn’t looked at the worktable since Jesper walked in. Wylan stands, still not looking at it, abandoning it all in favour of Jesper and - 

Jesper has to hope there isn’t anything on there that can’t wait - 

He’s already looking forward to next midwinter. 


End file.
